


To Mean It

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Prestige (2006)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-21
Updated: 2006-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1625906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Borden reflecting on Sarah, on one of the days that he means it.<br/>"It is not a question. It is a statement, made in relief, made of happiness, as she smoothes his hair like a mother might."</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Mean It

**Author's Note:**

> Written for orange sparks

 

 

Watching a hapless cloud skim a dense thicket of stars on its way across the sky, Alfred sank against the windowsill, slowly melting into form against it like warm clay in well-practiced hands. He utters a shaky sigh, rubbing his hands together, feeling an ages old scar on his thumb with the pad of his hand, for warmth against the tepid winter air that chills his paper-thin skin to the bone. He is without his coat, and the chill in the air is almost unbearably numbing. But his coat is too far away to be retrieved at the moment, and his mind is too far away from here to make his coat a priority. Well, he might have acknowledged if he'd the foresight to think of such things, his mind was not so far away. His mind was in the kitchen, slicing a plump, red apple with a knife blade as sharp and slick as quick silver, and as dangerous as apathy. Physically, his mind was close by. It was in the kitchen, so near he could touch it grip it in his hands. Temporally, his mind was three years, eighty-seven days and 12 hours in the past, which was much, much further away than the clock tower that extolled the lateness of the hour with the same dense, resounding ring that it might on any other night, unsympathetic and unyielding.   
+  
The knife thudded dully against the wooden countertop, sliding effortlessly through the thick apple that was so crisp it felt like slicing through snow. He raised the knife again to quarter the fruit that presented its tender underbelly to its carver, but as he brought down the knife, he found himself distracted by a sudden addition to the room, Sarah, draped in stiff green cotton that outlined her delicate form and contrasted beautifully with sensuous red-brown curls that dripped down her back like cascading candle wax. As his eyes traced the line of her dress, the blade traced the line of the apple along its designated course, not distinguishing between flesh and fruit when it contacted the skin on the pad of his thumb.

Excised jerkily from his brief moment of silent reverie, Alfred swore in a hiss under his breath, yanking his hand away and shaking it rapidly, as if he expected to shake off a knife wound. His unlikely potential cure failed, and he took instead to biting it firmly, sucking off the blood that dripped from the thin slice in his pink thumb. "Damn it," he repeated, muffled by the finger in his mouth that made it sound rather less threatening than it might have.

"What did you do?" Asks Sarah nervously, shuffling past the counter with the swish of a long summer's dress against the unfinished floor. She pulls his hand toward her, hissing in sympathetic pain, catching her lower lip between her teeth. She splays out her fingers, soft against the leathery skin of Alfred's palm, tracing the line of his thumb, pressing the odd heat of his fingerprints against the back of his hand, and examined the cut. "How did you nick yourself like that?" She asks, never expecting an answer as she turns to open a cabinet and reach for gauze, casts a glance inside a drawer to retrieve a bottle of iodine, approximately the same color of the blood slipping down his thumb. Sarah takes his hand again in her own, stroking his palm intentionally, but as if by accident and cleaning the cut with a gentle, sweeping pressure, though he inhales sharply from the sting of it.

Alfred shakes his head, is it is unimportant, "Distracted, I suppose," he replies, stretching out his fingers as Sarah wraps a piece of gauze gingerly around the tip of his thumb, taking care not to let it catch on the damaged thumbnail as winds it tightly around the flesh. Satisfied with her work, she presses a kiss to the clean gauze, tinged under several layers of white with a faint darkness and shadow of red. The more she winds it, the more he realizes that this means he'll have to slice his own thumb again this evening, when he meets up again with Fallon. With the other half of himself.

But Sarah's smile is so kind and so warming that he forgets to worry about it, at least for now, for the next few moments as he stretches out the sore thumb and balls his hand into a fist, but gives her a smile. She has a way about her, a kindness that always makes him want to smile, even when he's bleeding. Always makes him want to tell her that he loves her and to mean it. He never wants her to have to know that he doesn't. He never doesn't mean it, never. He always loves her: at least, whenever he is in his own mind. Alfred loves her. He cares nothing for Olivia in any capacity beyond a professional one. He cares for the tiny little girl who is sleeping in the other room, whose mother's eyes sparkle from above dark circles of worry. It was before she started to drink, when she was slender and kind and impossibly graceful for a woman of her stature and of her class. A woman who always smelled like lavender and carried herself like a queen.

"I love you," he tells her, slipping back into the moment, and reaching up to his good thumb along the swell of her rosy cheek. Her shapely red lips quirk in a tender, knowing smile.

"You mean it this time," she tells him. It is not a question. It is a statement, made in relief, made of happiness, as she smoothes his hair like a mother might and briefly brushes his lips with her own.

He always means it, he wants to say, but doesn't.

He always will mean it, he never said.   
+  
Glancing the cloud his eye followed on its path through the sky, Alfred's gaze stopped at the golden wedding band that still adorned ring finger like a brand. He was angry with it, angry that symbolism wasn't protection, that he had inadvertently killed the only woman he had ever loved without touching her. Because that had been the problem, after all. She wanted all of him, and then, he was only responsible for half. Suddenly, impassionedly, he wrenched the ring from his finger and throws it from the window, letting it fly through the air, letting it soar and letting gravity bring it down to its final resting place, letting go. He felt suddenly both free and empty and miserable as the ring settled in the dark streets of London. He let it fall, refused to watch the end of its path and turned in towards the near empty apartment to hear the sounds of rhythmic breathing. Of his daughter's rhythmic breathing. And in that moment, watching her, he had forgotten the ring.

And he would forget about the ring. He would forget until he returned to bed alone. He would forget until he settled in his sheets alone. He would forget until he groped around on the nightstand for his journal alone.

He would forget until he found the same band he had thrown from his windowsill sitting neatly on top of a deck of playing cards on his bedside drawer.

 


End file.
